Industrial hygiene monitoring also known as exposure monitoring is a process of evaluating and documenting employee potential exposures to biological, chemical and/or physical hazards. Monitoring can be qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative assessments involve observing the operation and the employee and noting the potential hazards. Based on those assessments, determinations are made if further evaluation is necessary. Quantitative assessments involve a sensing device that samples the worker's environment. Collected data is sent for laboratory analysis to determine if the average airborne concentration of a particular chemical agent or noise level poses a potential hazard. During that process, an employee wears the sampling equipment so their exposure during their normal work-shift can be determined.
There are numerous problems associated with wearing of the sampling equipment. For example, attaching a piece of equipment to an article of clothing can result in the equipment tugging on the article of clothing during the worker's day. Additionally, attachments to the equipment including wires, hoses, etc., can snag on various items resulting in the equipment becoming tangled, damaged, or separated from the article of clothing. Those problems result in workers not wanting to wear the sampling equipment, and many workers remove the sampling equipment at some point during their workday. Removal of the equipment leads to skewed results and requires re-sampling, costing a company time and money.
Another problem with simply clipping the sampling equipment to the clothing of the worker is that sampling equipment may shift during the workday. Because environmental conditions are not homogeneous at a work site (e.g., conditions around a worker's feet or waist are different than conditions around a worker's personal breathing zone (the approximate 9 inch circumference around a worker's head)), shifting of the sampling equipment causes the equipment to register different results based on the location from which the device samples the environment. Obtaining results from outside a worker's personalized breathing zone also skews results and also requires re-sampling.